Politics
Trump Aid Cuts End Contraception Access for Millions of Women
The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.
This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.
The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.
That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.
“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.
The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.
Support for family planning in the world’s poorest and most populous countries has been a consistent policy priority for both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades, seen as a bulwark against political instability. It also lowered the number of women seeking abortions.
Among the countries that will be significantly affected by the decision are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The money to support international family planning programs is appropriated by Congress and was extended in the most recent spending bill that keeps the government operating through September. The move by the State Department to cut these and other aid programs is the subject of multiple lawsuits currently before federal courts.
The Trump administration has also terminated American funding for the United Nations’ sexual and reproductive health agency, U.N.F.P.A., which is the world’s largest procurer of contraceptives. The United States was the organization’s largest donor.
Although the United States was not the sole supplier of contraception in any country, the abrupt termination of American funding has created chaos in the system and has already caused clinics to run out of products.
An estimated $27 million worth of family planning products already procured by U.S.A.I.D. are stuck at different points in the delivery system — on boats, in ports, in warehouses — with no programs or employees left to unload them or hand them over to governments, according to a former U.S.A.I.D. employee who was not authorized to speak to a reporter. One plan proposed by the new U.S.A.I.D. leadership in Washington is for remaining employees to destroy them.
Supply chain management was a major focus for U.S.A.I.D., across all areas of health, and the United States paid to move contraceptive supplies such as hormonal implants, for example, from manufacturers in Thailand to the port in Mombasa, Kenya, from where they were taken by trucks to warehouses across East Africa and then to local clinics.
“To put the pieces back together is going to be very difficult,” said Dr. Natalia Kanem, executive director of U.N.F.P.A. “Already this has had a catastrophic impact — it’s literally affecting millions of women and families. The poorest countries don’t have the resilient buffer.”
The United States also paid for data and information systems that helped governments track what was in stock and what they needed to order. None of those systems have operated since the Trump administration sent a stop-work order to all programs that received U.S.A.I.D. grants.
Bellington Vwalika, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Zambia, said that contraceptives had already begun to run short in some parts of the country, where the United States supplied a quarter of the national family planning budget.
“The affluent can buy the commodity they want — it is the poor people who have to think, ‘Between food and contraception, what should I get?’” he said.
Even before the United States pulled out of family planning programs, surveys found that globally, about 250 million women of reproductive age wished to avoid pregnancy but did not have access to a modern contraceptive method.
At the same time, there had been great progress. Demand for contraception has been rising steadily — with long-acting methods that offer women greater privacy and secure protection — in Africa, the region of the world with the lowest coverage. Supply has improved with better infrastructure that helped get products to rural areas. And “demand creation” projects, of which the United States was a major funder, used advertisements and social media to inform people about the range of contraceptive choices available and the advantages of spacing or delaying pregnancies. Women’s rising levels of education boosted demand, too.
Thelma Sibanda, a 27-year-old engineering graduate who lives in a low-income community on the edge of the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, two weeks ago received a hormonal implant that will prevent pregnancy for five years, at a free pop-up clinic run by Population Services Zimbabwe, which had a multiyear U.S.A.I.D. grant to deliver free family planning services.
Ms. Sibanda has a 2-year-old son and says she cannot afford more children: She can’t find a job in Zimbabwe’s fractured economy, and neither can her husband. They subsist on the $150 he earns each month from a vegetable stand. She had been relying on “hope and faith and natural methods” to prevent another pregnancy since her son was born, Ms. Sibanda said, and had wished for something more reliable, but it simply wasn’t possible in her family’s budget — until the free clinic came to her neighborhood.
With its U.S.A.I.D. funding, the Zimbabwean organization that provided her implant last year was able to buy six sturdy Toyota vehicles and camping equipment so that an outreach team could travel to the most remote regions of the country, delivering vasectomies and IUDs in pop-up clinics. Since the Trump executive order, they have had to stop using all of that equipment.
The Zimbabwean organization is a branch of the international nonprofit MSI Reproductive Choices, which has stepped in with temporary funds so the teams can continue to provide free care for the women they can reach, such as Ms. Sibanda. MSI can cover the costs only until September.
Ms. Sibanda said her priority was providing the best possible education for her son, and because school fees are costly, that means no more children. But many African women have no way to make this kind of choice. In Uganda, while the national fertility rate is 4.5 children per woman, it’s not unusual to meet women in rural areas with limited education who have eight or 10 children, said Dr. Justine Bukenya, a lecturer in community health and behavioral science at Makerere University in Kampala. These women become pregnant for the first time as teenagers and have little space between pregnancies.
“By the time they are 30 they could have their 10th pregnancy — and these are the women who will be affected,” she said. “We are losing the opportunity to make progress with them. The United States was doing a very strong job here of creating demand for contraception with these women, and mobilizing young men and women to go for family planning.”
Some women who have relied on free or low-cost service through public health systems may now try to buy contraceptives in the private market. But prices of pills, IUDs and other devices will most likely rise significantly without the guaranteed, large-volume purchases from the United States.
“As a result, women who previously relied on free or affordable options through public health systems may now be forced to turn to private sector sources — at prices they cannot afford,” said Karen Hong, chief of U.N.F.P.A.’s supply chain unit.
The next largest donors to family planning after the United States are the Netherlands, which provided about 17 percent of donor government funding in 2023, and Britain, with 13 percent. Both countries recently announced plans to cut their aid budgets by a third or more.
Ms. Ba said the focus in the West African countries where she works was mobilizing domestic resources and figuring out how governments can try to reallocate money to cover what the United States was supplying. Philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation and financial institutions including the World Bank, which are already significant contributors to family planning, may offer additional funding to try to keep products moving into countries.
“We were getting so optimistic — even with all the political instability in our region, we were adding millions more women using modern methods in the last few years,” Ms. Ba said. “And now all of it, the U.S. support, the policies, it’s all completely gone. The gaps are just too huge to fill.”
Politics
Trump floats replacing 250th anniversary concert with massive MAGA rally after artists pull out
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President Donald Trump on Saturday floated the idea of hosting a massive MAGA rally to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary after numerous artists pulled out of a planned concert this summer.
In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump suggested scrapping the Great American State Fair’s Freedom 250 concerts. He also took aim at a federal judge who on Friday ordered that his name be removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
“We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” Trump wrote.
“Cancel it, just like I canceled my involvement with the failing and unsafe to be in Kennedy Center, because a Highly Conflicted, Crooked Federal Judge, said that I should not be allowed to spend my time and money in order to MAKE THE CENTER GREAT AGAIN, actually, far greater than it ever was before!” he continued.
AMERICA 250 EVENTS TAKING PLACE THIS SUMMER CALLED ‘ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME’ TRAVEL OPPORTUNITIES
President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 3, 2025. (Alex Brandon/AP)
The comments came as several artists backed out of performing at the Great American State Fair, a large-scale national celebration planned on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., stretching from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument.
The event is scheduled to run from June 25 through July 10, 2026, as part of the nation’s America 250 celebration.
Earlier this week, Freedom 250 organizers released a list of performers slated to appear at the event, but several artists later withdrew, including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, Young MC, Morris Day and The Time, and C+C Music Factory.
FIVE ARTISTS PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP SHOULD CALL TO PERFORM AT FREEDOM 250 CONCERT THIS SUMMER
President Trump floats hosting a massive MAGA rally for the nation’s 250th anniversary after several artists pulled out of planned Freedom 250 concert events. (Doug Mills/Getty Images/Pool)
Other performers, including rapper Vanilla Ice, have said they are “honored” to participate.
In a separate social media post Saturday, Trump suggested he could replace the concert with a major speech after several artists got “the yips.”
“I understand Artists are getting ‘the yips’ having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate ‘Artists,’ and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!” Trump wrote.
TRUMP CALLS ON AMERICANS TO PRAY FOR NATION AS 250TH BIRTHDAY APPROACHES: ‘ONE NATION UNDER GOD’
Vanilla Ice is “honored” to get to play during the Great American State Fair in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary of independence. (Scott Dudelson/Getty Images)
Trump said he was considering delivering the speech and holding a rally June 24 to kick off the festivities.
“I don’t want so-called ‘Artists’ that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy,” he wrote. “I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN.”
Freedom 250 later announced that Trump would, in fact, deliver a speech ahead of the Great American State Fair.
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“As the visionary behind the Great American State Fair, we are excited to announce that President Trump will personally kick off this historic celebration on Wednesday, June 24 in an opening ceremony celebrating America’s 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez wrote on X.
Fox News Digital’s Lori A Bashian and Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
With just days left to campaign and polls putting him in an unexpectedly strong third place — maybe even second — Tom Steyer is down-not-out. But Riverside’s favorite MAGA sheriff and Republican contender Chad Bianco is almost definitely shoulders-to-the-mat done.
That means there’s no chance of a Republican sweep in this blue state, and suddenly, what has up until now been a pretty dry governor’s primary race has turned into one that has a slim-but-genuine chance at a surprise ending — two Democrats on the November ticket.
“It’s a low probability,” political data guru Paul Mitchell told me, “But there’s always a chance.”
He puts it somewhere under 10%. But stranger things have happened. Spencer Pratt, for instance.
Those of you who have hung on to your ballots like winning lottery tickets, and those who plan on voting in person, will largely decide what happens next: An Xavier Becerra-Steve Hilton top two is a virtual election for Becerra since there just aren’t enough Republican voters in the state to carry a general election. A Becerra-Steyer face-off would force both candidates to define a vision of California beyond generic liberal ideas.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing California have that Dem-on-Dem showdown so that voters of all parties (or none) have the chance to pin these would-be leaders down on the details of their policies. So far, this election has been light on the specifics, but the state faces real problems — from a failing healthcare system to gas prices that literally mystify even lawmakers.
Everything changes when a candidate becomes a winner, so maybe it would be good for democracy to have an old-fashioned war of ideas in this moment when the future of California holds so many unknowns.
Is Steyer just a billionaire dilettante trying to buy an office? Is Becerra beholden to the many corporate interests who have funded his campaign? Those are just the top-line questions many voters still have.
“There’s lots of shades of blue,” pointed out Chad Peace of the Independent Voter Project, on a press call to support open primaries. “When we only look at things as, ‘Oh, there’s red and there’s blue,’ we forget that.”
But voters remain nervous, and the ballot is still packed — along with the top three, former Rep. Katie Porter and San José Mayor Matt Mahan are still campaigning, though with falling support.
Voters, Mitchell said, “are really thinking about the implications” of their vote, and perhaps don’t want to throw it away on a candidate they perceive as having no chance. That’s why the new polls showing Steyer as a contender have the potential of stirring up momentum, especially for voters who originally saw themselves filling in the bubble for one of those candidates on the decline.
Recent polls have put Steyer in a near-dead-heat with Republican front-runner Hilton, both hovering slightly above or below 20%. Becerra, the former California attorney general and a former Biden Cabinet secretary, leads them both by a few points, especially among Latino voters. As my colleague Gustavo Arellano has pointed out, Becerra would be the state’s second Latino governor, after Romualdo Pacheco, who held the office for 10 months in 1875.
“A Dem-Dem race, maybe we’ll get more people involved, because it’s going to be a harder fight, you know?” Diane McClure told me. She’s a board member of the California Nurses Assn., which endorsed Steyer early — in large part because he supports a plan for single-payer health insurance, which that union has long fought for.
McClure, of course, would love to see Steyer take the top spot in that easy-win scenario against Hilton, though that seems doubtful. But a Steyer-Becerra race?
“Maybe it’s a good thing, maybe it’ll wake some people up,” she said.
For his part, Steyer is staying the course. At a Sacramento stop Friday, he bounded around chatting with about four dozen mostly union supporters, wearing trademark Nikes, this time a vintage pair with a tartan plaid swoop.
“Four days,” Steyer said when he finally took the microphone. “I really need you to stand with me. But let me say this: you stand with me, I stand with you.”
Unlike his debate performances, Steyer is passionate, and, though it seems unlikely based on his television appearances, has an amiable charisma dotted with a fair amount of light profanity.
“Make a decent living, buy a house, have a great education for your kids, and retire,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to build here. We can easily do that. When people say that’s not possible, bull—, that’s bull—.”
It was enough to sway Ricky Carter, one of the few non-union members in the room, who was invited because his wife, Barbara, was on a prayer chain with another invitee. An older Black man originally from South Los Angeles, Carter represents a demographic where Steyer has growing popularity.
“I believe him. He got it right in here,” he said, pounding a fist over his heart. “It ain’t about no color, creed and race. … It’s about the people.”
Indeed, elections are about the people, though it doesn’t always feel like it. But suddenly, this one does.
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An anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agitator was hit with federal charges after gnarly photos showed bloody bite marks he allegedly made into federal agents’ arms during violent clashes outside Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
Brendan John Geier, a 26-year-old man from Madison, New Jersey, was part of a group of agitators blocking the road near Delaney Hall on Thursday night when ICE deportation officers instructed the group to move away, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
The group allegedly ignored the commands and instead violently engaged with the officers, according to the DOJ. Geier then “engaged in a struggle with deportation officers, kicking officers and ultimately biting an officer’s forearm, and another’s knuckle. Both victims received treatment at a local hospital,” prosecutors said. He was charged with assaulting federal officers and causing bodily injury and appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Cari Fais on Friday, the DOJ said.
“We will not tolerate the vicious attacks on ICE officers we’ve seen in New Jersey the last few days. These riots are clearly not ‘peaceful protests’ as you can see from the photos of these horrific wounds. Assault a federal officer, you’ll be held accountable,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a Friday afternoon post on X.
NEW JERSEY AGITATORS BITE, KICK AND PUNCH ICE AGENTS AS DELANEY HALL CLASHES CONTINUE; 9 MORE ARRESTED: DHS
Blanche posted to X photos of bloodied ICE agents displaying their wounds.
Immigration agents display bloody wounds they allegedly incurred when New Jersey man Brendan John Geier bit them. May 28, 2026. (U.S. Department of Justice)
“Peaceful protest doesn’t translate to violently attacking federal law enforcement officers,” Blanche said in a statement. “Federal officers are protecting United States’ property and facilities. With virtually no local law enforcement support from New Jersey, rioters are regrouping and attacking. We will not tolerate the vicious attacks we have seen in Newark the last few days, and we will make arrests and hold people accountable for criminal conduct.”
“As alleged in the Justice Department’s complaint, this violent rioter savagely bit an ICE law enforcement officer outside of Delaney Hall. The Trump Administration will always stand with our law enforcement officers,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin also added in the statement. “Anyone who assaults a law enforcement officer will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
ANTI-ICE AGITATORS THROW WOODEN PALLETS, MATTRESSES AT FEDERAL AGENTS DURING CHAOTIC NJ DETENTION CENTER CLASH
Federal immigration officers clashed with protesters outside Delaney Hall in Newark, N.J., on Thursday. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu)
“As alleged, this defendant responded to lawful orders from federal officers by kicking one and biting two others who were performing their official duties,” U.S. Attorney Robert Frazer for the District of New Jersey also said in the statement. “Assaulting law enforcement officers is unacceptable. Period. Federal officers must be able to carry out their responsibilities without being subjected to violence, intimidation, or obstruction. This Office will continue to prosecute those who, as alleged here, assault officers and interfere with the lawful execution of their duties.”
“To be clear, peaceful protest does not mean biting, kicking, or punching law enforcement officers,” Acting Special Agent in Charge Spiros Karabinas of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Newark added in the statement.
“The repeated assaults on federal officers at Delaney Hall are criminal acts — not protected speech. Homeland Security Investigations is unwavering in its commitment to hold those who attack law enforcement fully accountable under the law,” Karabinas concluded.
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Demonstrations at Delaney Hall were in their sixth night by Thursday. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu)
Ongoing demonstrations outside Delaney Hall are entering their second week.
Fox News Digital contacted the DOJ for additional information.
On Saturday morning, anti-ICE agitators and counterprotesters were both seen outside Delaney Hall. A crowd was growing, and many officers were seen patrolling on bikes, with a visible divide between pro-ICE protesters and anti-ICE agitators.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who spent Memorial Day at Delaney Hall supporting the anti-ICE crowds, announced Friday that she was instructing New Jersey State Police to assume responsibility for public safety outside the detention center. Earlier in the week, Mullin had placed the blame on Sherrill for not allowing local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. DHS said local police were largely absent as federal agents were met with violent demonstrators.
Fox News’ Kimberly Ruiz contributed to this report.
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